Why Aren't Tablet Gaming Peripherals More Popular?

While mobile accessories and tablets dominated CES more than anything else, I was surprised to only find a pair of companies selling gaming peripherals for tablets.

Two obvious caveats apply: CES isn’t a gaming conference, and I could have missed something, although I think I was pretty thorough in scouring the floor. In any case, there wasn’t a massive tablet gaming presence.

Turning tablets into board games seems like an idea that would be popular, especially in the consumer-driven environment of CES. I know they’re certainly out there, but with it impossible to overstate how saturated the show was with tablets, I would have thought people would be going hog-wild for tablet gaming. I’d be most interested in hearing what you think.

The first company I came across was called Verzis, and was showing off a pair of Bluetooth-powered controllers that can run games pretty much any newer iOS or Android device.

A rep first showed me the four-sided controller, with an interactive game tied to the TV show The Voice (which I’ve never seen, so I didn’t quite understand how the game worked) and a fairly basic ship-battling game where you sail around with the arrows on the pad. Neither was anything supremely mind-blowing graphics-wise, but being able to have four players play at once is a pretty awesome idea, as you’d never be able to pull it off otherwise. I like the concept.

The other peripheral from Verzis was a more standard game board, which mostly seemed to use the tablet to run the game basics–dice rolling, quiz popups, etc. Buying the board means getting 10 games (of which I saw only one, which was basically a spin the wheel, move the piece game with a bit of strategy) and 10 different board pieces for the wings. I suppose it’d be cool to have 10 board games in one, but the main problem I see is that making good board games that have a lot of replay value is not easy, and what I saw seemed a bit simple for my tastes. But I’m sure young kids would also dig it.

Kids were the full focus of the second company I came across, called d-Red. They had a series of kid-oriented peripherals on display under the MyLearn banner, which run a whole mess of apps via Bluetooth on iPads. The one above was just a setup of four buttons, which basically acts as a giant controller for an iPad.

Next was a pretty straightforward block system used mostly for spelling and math games I guess. It was mostly notable because it appeared to recognize how the blocks were oriented.

This thing was a little more interesting. On one side was a keyboard (I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be in a QWERTY layout, but perhaps it’s easier for kids learning the alphabet to keep the letters in order) and the other was … a keyboard.

If I had kids, I'd be chill with them playing with something like this or the much larger tabletop version also on offer. But, yeah, as a sometimes grown-up, that's about all I'm capable of writing about these things. I'm still surprised to not have seen more things like them at the show, but perhaps people buy tablets precisely because they don't want to have to play games that have a whole bunch of extra crap to set up. It all comes down to the games themselves, and I wasn't totally blown away by what I saw. Maybe when an Angry Birds board game comes out, peripherals will take off.

@derektmead